Excel Clone for Linux Now in Beta

Martin Kotulla writes "SoftMaker, a German software developer, has released the first public beta of PlanMaker 2004, a native-Linux spreadsheet that is highly Excel-compatible ... in fact, this app is basically Microsoft Excel ported to Linux, including Excel-compatible charting and even AutoShapes. Here is a chart comparing Excel, OpenOffice.org, and PlanMaker." Update: 05/07 19:07 GMT by M : Softmaker.de is temporarily down; the site can still be reached at softmaker.com.

Comments

What surprised me most

[ObviousGuy]

The thing that really surprised me was how badly OpenOffice supported (or rather, didn't support) Excel's functionality.

You may say that those features are part of the 80% of features that aren't used, but someone's using them. If those someones aren't able to use those features, OpenOffice is useless for them.

Re:What surprised me most

[sommere]

So they were able to pick out 5-6 features that OO.o couldn't support that they did. That's hardly proof that they support more excel features than OO.o.

If an independent group created a bunch of hard to read excel files and they compared how many each displayed correctly -- then I'd believe that their support is better. For all I know they went out of their way to find limitations of OO.o and implement those features first so they could make those images.

Re:What surprised me most

[garcia]

I have been saying this for quite some time on here. OpenOffice is NOT an acceptable replacement for MS Office regardless of what you hear the slashbots saying.

Yes, OpenOffice is good for what *most* people do. It certainly does not support everything that everyone uses. Just because it is "good enough" for some it certainly isn't what the rest of us want.

From what I saw in the screenshots only it *looks* good. I won't know until I actually run it. I am a bit leary of running any beta software that I don't have access to the source code.

Running strangely named binaries from .tgz files reminds me of days-gone-by in Linux... I figured for a well done "port" that they would at least have the idea that they should make the executable something named better than what it is.

Re:What surprised me most

[Jody Goldberg]

I'd be interested in getting copies of any file that you have trouble with to see how Gnumeric fairs. Getting good test cases can be very helpful. Our confidentiality policy can apply if desired. Please contact me.

Thanks

Google cache

[GillBates0]

of the first two links:

Softmaker
PlanMaker

Re:The wrong path

[rrkap]

When people send me Excel files, I kindly ask them to re-send the file in CSV or some other format. Yes, there are things you can only do in native file format. But the vast majority of users never do those things.

Ah, yes. I can't remember the last time I saw someone use excel to create a chart or calculate something. The fact is that calculation and presentation of data are the two main points of spreadsheets and neither works with CSV files.

mirror of comparison chart

[whizkid042]

http://www.unixauthority.com/~fiskeja/mirror/www.s oftmaker.de/pmwcomp_en.htm

Don't Forget Gnumeric!

[Rysc]

Gnumeric is a much better spreadsheet program than OOo Spread. It's also better than Excell in all ways in which it competes, except for charting . (And they'll be fixing that *real soon now*). Enough of this crappy OOo stuff and commerical stuff. Use Gnumeric! This is not SIAG or some krappy Koffice attempt, it's teh best Excel-styel spreadsheet program you can get.

Re:Don't Forget Gnumeric!

[praedor]

I've used all three (gnumeric, kspread, and OOcalc). I do find that gnumeric is quite good, but not really any better at those data analysis tools than kspread is. Both gnumeric and kspread suffer (TREMENDOUSLY) in the charting arena. Gnumeric doesn't even have a broken rudimentary graphing capability while kspread ties into kchart which is a horrible charting app. OOcalc kicks both their butts on charting, but it doesn't match up to the charting possible from excel.

Of course, excel cannot hold a candle to the charting capabilites of DeltaGraph or CricketGraph (both Mac apps...do they have PC versions?). I have begged the koffice developers to fix the atrocious kcharting app so that it is actually of use (mostly hard-of-hearing ears if not outright deaf ears). I hope against hope that OO will improve its charting capabilities (C'mon! You CANNOT do proper charting if you don't do error bars). Gnumeric doesn't even enter the picture here. Nothing at all in the charting arena so all the nice data analysis done in gnumeric is for naught. There's no way to plot it out, no way to graphically represent it.

Re:What about Gnumeric?

[Rysc]

Those screenshots are out of date. By about 6 years. Try some newer ones.

Re:Home use only

[JanneM]

Like Gnumeric, you mean?

Re:Works on other free unixes (at least 1)

[tepples]

Did Microsoft gave the developers access to the Excel source code?

No, but MSDN lists almost every single function in the app, making cloning Excel just a job of implementing the functions.

Re:What about Gnumeric?

[Tet]

Gnumeric is so great, and it opens Excel files too

Agreed. Like OO.o, it doesn't have 100% coverage of everything in Excel. But I can say that for real world use, rather than contrived examples, it opens every spreadsheet I've tried it with, without problems[1]. It also has the benefit of being literally 10 times faster than oocalc.

[1] I'm talking about recent versions here. If you haven't tried it lately, give post-1.2 releases a shot. It's come a long way...

Weak charting

[Jody Goldberg]

Gnumeric is admittedly still pretty weak on the charting side. However, things are improving quickly. Please file a few feature requests to help guide things. 1.3.x has support for error bars now (still need to hook up the xls import for that) and the polar (what xl calls radar) plot engine is in place too. My short term goals are to extend the axis mapping support, and add a gnuplotish implicit iterator feature that is not in XL.

RTFA please..Re:Another "Will Not Succeed" project

[advocate_one]

You are a twit... would you like to try reading the F'ing article next time... Planmaker for MS-Windows already exists and is refered to on their webpage... but I can't give you the precise link 'cos the site's been slashdotted... Here's the griff from the google cache of their home page

SoftMaker is dedicated to creating office productivity software for popular operating systems, including Windows, Windows CE, and Linux.

Our current English-language products comprise TextMaker and PlanMaker, a word processor and a spreadsheet for Windows, Linux, Pocket PCs, and Handheld PCs, and MegaFont XXL, a 10,000-fonts typeface library for Windows, Linux, and OS/2.

I'm part of the public beta program for the Linux versions and am a happy customer using the Linux version of Textmaker.

Also Softmaker are perfectly happy sticking to the English and European markets... they're obviously doing well as they're still in existence after several years.

Re:Still Waiting on Solver

[Jody Goldberg]

Gnumeric has solver, goal seek, and iterative expressions.

xls is documented

[Jody Goldberg]

somewhat

It is a persistent untruth that there is no documentation for these vast binary blobs. MS itself published their internal docs as what I assume was filler material in the 'Excel 97 Developers kit' they were not complete, and have been known to contain errors or miss features. However they are a decent starting point. The OOo folk have also done a wonderful job of writing up the format. The vast majority of the work reading xls has nothing to do with deciphering the bits. The real issue is mapping or figuring out the datastructures that the format implies. If you can use an internal representation that mirrors MS XL import/export is trivial. When there is an impedence mismatch ... there is alot more work and bugs.

Re:The wrong path

[AstroDrabb]

MS's XML format is more of a PR stunt then really being open. MS has barked a million times about "IP" and MS Office is one of their biggest cash cows. Basically they made a schema that will let you read the MS Office docs, but they still keep tons of closed proprietary stuff in those XML files. What is the purpose of being able to read the file if the important content is a binary blob in some proprietary format? The plain text is readable, so a simple Word doc is easy to read (though competing office apps have been able to do that for a long time). MS Office will truly be open when MS release full specs of the file format and all that could possibly be in them. I can give you an XML file with a Base64 encoded blob of proprietary data. Just because it is XML does not make it Open. OpenOffice's format is _really_ open. You can get docs that explain the format and how to read or write OOo's file formats. This is not the case for MS. If it is, please provide a link to the MS Office document _specs_ and not just some silly schema.

As a little test, create a new Excel file and on Sheet 2 put the following data:

1 1
1 2
1 4
1 4

Now on Sheet1, insert a chart using the data on Sheet2. Now try to save it as "XML SpreadSheet (*.xml)". You will get a warning that all "AutoShapes, other objects and Charts" will be removed. What is the point of this "open" XML format if it cannot save complex spreadsheets? MS will never let their MS Office format go. End of story.

Re:Row Limit

[martin-k]

The current limit of 16384 rows is not set in stone. We had PlanMaker builds with 65536 and 256K rows, but then some functions (like sorting whole columns) were too slow -- remember that we are also supporting Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs, and CPU-wise, they are at a i286 or i386 level.

As soon as we have optimized some of these routines, the row limit will be raised.

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Re:Unfortunately...

[martin-k]

No, in fact we haven't.

It's commercial software, I need to make payroll every month. If you can get over this fact, the rest is really lenient. Remember Philippe Kahn's "just like a book" license? That's what our license is modeled after -- install on as many machines as you like, but only use as many copies concurrently as you have licenses.

If "free" is what you are after, get ahold of a copy of SUSE Linux 9.1. It ships with TextMaker Free Edition and PlanMaker Free Edition.